Net Traffic Shocks Mimic Earthquakes

belphegor writes "Technology Research News is running an article describing research linking the similarties between Earthquakes and Internet traffic. By pinging hosts across the network, researchers 'were able to measure frequent changes in Internet congestion...results showed that the Internet, like the earth's network of faults, exhibits criticality -- a condition of sudden and drastic change. "Sudden drastic congestion leads to a large value of the round trip time of the ping signal, which is identified with a main shock," said Abe. The researchers referred to these sudden, drastic traffic changes as Internetquakes.' They also saw 'aftershocks' that can be mathematically described in a similar manner to the seismic ones more familiar to many Californians."

Comments

The name for this phenomenon?

[viper21]

The Slashdot Effect.

I'm surprised that it isn't mentioned in the article. They are probably trying to patent it, I'm sure.

-S

That explains a lot

[r_j_prahad]

Our company's webmaster has managed to exactly duplicate the San Andreas fault then. That box is shakier than California... oops, here comes another tremor now. Yup, reduced to rubble one more time.

One of these days I'll find some way to get the URL posted to Slashdot and I can see if computers really do burst into flame and shoot out showers of sparks like on the old Star Trek....

This behavior is predicted by Celullar Automata

[eyefish]

This pattern of behavior (where two completelly different things show the same underlying behavior and/or explanation) is exactly one of the things that Stephen Wolfran is trying to explain in his book A New Kind of Science (see amazon link and reviews here)

Basically, everything in the universe can be explained as a huge network of nodes, where all these node do is computations following very simple rules. From such simple rules we get all the laws of physics, human behavior, chaotic behavior, and in this case the behavior of an earthquake and Internet traffic.

Re:This behavior is predicted by Celullar Automata

[WEFUNK]

Another book that is more directly related to this behavior is Per Bak's "How Nature Works". Bak demonstrates how many systems in nature, including earthquakes, highway traffic, and evolution, are governed by very similar power laws and he proposes that these systems naturally evolve to a state of "self organized criticality" as is mentioned in the article.

A simplistic model that he uses to describe this principle is a conical pile of sand that is built up by dropping one particle at a time. The pile will build and build and then experience surface avalanches apparently set off by only a single piece of additional sand. The frequency and size of these also follow the same type of power law. Self organized criticality is really a updated version of catastrophe theory and theories involving constraints. I'm still not sure if Wolfram has really shed any new light on this area, but some of his work might be used to explore the fundamental cause behind this apparently common principle.

I believe that some of these ideas are already used quite practically. For instance, knowledge that traffic jams can be caused without any external cause (accidents etc.) can provide insight into whether changing speed limits or adding additional lanes can ease congestion (or worsen it). Models and simulations can be built and sometimes the answers are found to be contrary to common sense.

the net is a non-linear resonant circuit

[cats-paw]

I like to think of the net as a non-linear resonant
circuit. The correct starting conditions give
you very large responses to "small" inputs.

It's resonant so you see "ringing" in the response.

Seems to me that you can definitely look at the
earth's crust in a similar manner.

Re:I think I speak for all of us when I say...

[Jonny Ringo]

Ok. I guess that would make /. a fault line of the internet.

Re:For instance

[Com2Kid]

*COUGH* fixs HTML *COUGH*

When ever a new pentium 4 CPU is released Germany experiences sudden lag.

When ever new office toys are sent out for review Australia takes a hit

and when ever some idiot with a backhoe digs up a backbone line, well hell, the entire USA goes ploink.

Please make it stop...

[SkyLeach]

"linking the similarties between Earthquakes and Internet traffic..."

I thought that there was nothing else they could call "like a <insert something to do with technology>", but there they go one-upping me again. So our brains are like computers, our genes are like source code, and our networks are like geology. Perhaps we really are in a matrix? Or perhaps all those similies in school are finally showing their ugly far-reaching effects on society.

We should commission a study, but then, somebody probably already has and I'll read about it on slashdot next week.

NEWSFLASH...

[thrillbert]

Internet, Aug. 27, 2002 - The Technology Research News (www.trnmag.com), which recently wrote an article on how Net Traffic mimics earthquakes, experienced an earthquake that shattered their networks, and brought down their servers. The earthquake measure 8.4 on the CmdrTaco TEBCF scale (time elapsed before complete failure).

News Correspondent Kimberly Patch had this to say via her cell phone connection: "one minute we're up and working, next thing you know everything just went crazy. People were screaming and running out of the building. I tried to keep calm, but at one point, knowing the magnitude of things, I paniced and ran out of the building screaming bloody murder!"

A representative from OSDN was quoted as saying: "heh.. heh.. umm.. heh heh.. nice huh?".

Calls to slashdot.org were not immediately returned.

---
(Score: +1 Funny, +1 Interesting, +1 Too Much Time on Hands)

Ok, So I actually read the article....

[mwjlewis]

" In the case of the Internet, each site is connected to the whole through servers, which host web pages, and routers, which coordinate traffic. The servers and routers themselves also form a hierarchical clustering structure, said Abe.

So these server items Host only web pages, and all the traffic on the internet is web traffic, which moves from link to link by a "router". This is very upsetting that college educations and many many years of research show something that could be acomplished in 20 mintues with a SDSL line, a p0rn site on a connection faster then the SDSL line, and finally root@box'#ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

I wounder if they have their MCSE?

Bells vs. Marshmallows

[ArcSecond]

Hmmm... I like the idea of an Internet that "rings". But isn't it the "ringing" that we would like to get rid of from the net, in the same way we might wish the earth didn't "ring" so well during earthquakes?

What is the opposite of this model? Something like a marshmallow or ball of silly putty, that deforms to store energy and allows that energy to be released over time? I know that might affect the individual round-trip times, but it might improve efficiency on a larger scale.

I'm not sure what the rules for the nodes would be, but obviously there would have to be a way to balance "slack" and "stress" at different scales simultaneously, in order to avoid criticality. Anyone know about any models that have this kind of behaviour?

Predicting Congestion?

[Anonym1ty]

Well what about the problem in this self organizing system, that you probably change the inherent nature of the system by observing it?

"...The simple ping signals were emitted every second and traveled through 10 different routers before the signals eventually reached the destination computer. The researchers were able to measure frequent changes in Internet congestion by measuring the time it took a series of signals to complete a round trip..."

How much bandwidth will these test pings take up inorder to have enough data to construct a model of current conditions that's good enough to predict bandwidth changes far enough ahead to make smart routers that can work around the congestion prior to it's existance? It would be kinda neat to have an internet that routes around inorder to prevent predicted congestion.

Predicting Lag

[tarsi210]

I always wondered how long it would be before someone tried to give a "weather report" for the Internet. I imagined that some day the daily Internet traffic report would appear right alongside Reporter Bob up in TrafficCopter 7 reporting on the condition of Highway 69 at 8am.

"Well, Joan, it looks like Slashdot it at it again. You'll want to keep clear of Alter.net this morning as it appears to be having congestion problems around the Midwest. Communications to anything near a corn field is likely to be slow to smack-me-dead stupid through the 9 o'clock hour. Queue up those emails, folks."

One has to wonder if it's even possible to predict and gauge incoming traffic problems. I guess you would have to know the effective capacity of the Internet, and sub-portions of it, at all times. I can see how a router's effective capacity could be measured by its effective throughput and cache. Your "sentinal level" would occur when the cache is full and bandwidth is maxed and the packets start to get a one-way trip to /dev/null. However, I would think it'd be tough to always keep up on what everyone has for capacity unless the backbone providers regularly publish these stats, as well as the stats on current traffic.

I don't know if it would be helpful or not. One one hand, it'd be handy to know that the reason I'm getting 1900ms ping time to SF this morning is because some dumbass tripped on a power cord, but on the other hand, if I really care that much, I can probably figure it out using traceroute et al.

Maybe it's a solution to keep everyone and their dog from flooding the 'net each time a router bites the big one and makes a suburb blink out of existence for a few hours. Other than that, it just sounds like a good excuse to draw pretty graphs.

Re:Was slashdot asked to help with the research?

[Bonker]

Slashdot has also been a mitigating factor to some of the most severe 'quakes', especially if you're discussing the information transmitted rather than just network traffic.

Case in point? 9-11-01.

CNN was gone. USA Today was gone. Fox News was gone. Slashdot, however, was providing first-hand accounts of the disaster/attack as well as discussion about them.

Re:For instance

[Quietust]

Here's a few I found after doing a Google search for backhoe "internet backbone":

• Backhoe Event Cuts East Coast Internet Artery
• Unscheduled Outages Monday March 27

Given a bit more searching (and better search terms), I could probably come up with a bunch, including the one that hit Internic a while ago (resulting in a massive 4 hour net-wide outage).